Education Department reinstates college accrediting service that Obama terminatedDepartment of Education secretary Betsy DeVos earlier this year reinstated the for-profit college accreditor Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools even though the organization did not meet federal education standards.

The Education Department March 2018 report, released Friday in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, revealed that department analysts had concerns with restoring ACICS and expressed those concerns to DeVos, Politico reported.

The report concluded that the Trump administration should not reinstate ACICS, however, a month after the report was released, DeVos moved forward and restored the federal powers of the organization.

Former President Barack Obama terminated the organization in 2016 after the administration found it had not been following 21 federal standards.

DeVos was able to reinstate ACICS after a federal judge ruled the Obama administration unlawfully ignored relevant evidence in making the 2016 decision.

However, department spokeswoman Liz Hill suggested to Politico in an email that DeVos had no say in the decision for ACICS to be reinstated, but it was instead the judge's ruling that forced the decision.

“The Secretary did not make the determination to reinstate ACICS,” Hill said. “A judge ruled that the previous administration failed to consider 36,000 pages of relevant evidence before making its decision to withdraw ACICS's recognition as an accreditor and remanded the case back to the Secretary.”

DeVos is working on a more long-term decision regarding the status of ACICS.

https:// www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/education-department-reinstates-college-accrediting-service-that-obama-terminated

Florida commissioner breaks silence after report showed his office skipped concealed carry background checks for more than a year

Florida Commissioner of Agriculture Adam Putnam promised that his office will never again fail to perform a background check.

Putnam pledged to dedicate "extra eyeballs" to the matter at a press conference on Saturday, days after it was revealed his office skipped background checks for concealed carry applications for more than a year.

The lapse occurred from February 2016 to November 2017 and reportedly took place because the employee in charge of conducting the checks misplaced the login credentials to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, an FBI crime database that flags applicants that have disqualifying history in other states.

Putnam noted that the employee in question failed to conduct followup inquiries for 365 applicants. The state has retroactively revoked 291 concealed carry licenses and fired the negligent employee.

Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., — one of Putnam's opponents in the 2018 Florida gubernatorial election — slammed the commissioner during a Saturday campaign event.

"Adam has spent years campaigning for governor, basically, in this position and the report was very concerning because it seemed like he wasn't minding the store when we needed him to be there," he told supporters. "I also want to know why, if this report was done a year ago, why are we just now finding out about this?"

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/florida-commissioner-breaks-silence-after-report-showed-his-office-skipped-concealed-carry-background-checks-for-more-than-a-year

>>1682181

She has, I just wonder if the kids who got screwed out of an education can get some kind of redo.

Senators to Trump: Send Cabinet member to Taiwan on North Korea summit day

President Trump should send a cabinet-level official to Taiwan next week, a quartet of Senate Republicans suggested Friday.

“This will demonstrate our unwavering commitment to one of our strongest democratic partners in the region,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla.

https:// www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/senators-to-trump-send-cabinet-member-to-taiwan-on-north-korea-summit-day

The American Institute of Taiwan, a nonprofit organization that functions as an unofficial U.S. embassy in Taipei, is opening a new facility on Tuesday, June 12. The lawmakers want a senior administration official to attend, as a message to China, which regards the functionally-independent island as a breakaway province. That trip, if Trump accepted the recommendation, would take place on the same day that the president meets with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, whose regime is a historic client of China’s.

“Taiwan is not only an important economic and security partner, but also a strong ally of the United States,” the senators, senior members of the Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees, wrote in the letter. “It is everything we want for the Indo-Pacific region, a vibrant democracy with a prosperous free-market economy. AIT’s new office will be more than just a building. It will serve as a tangible symbol of the enduring friendship between Washington, D.C. and Taipei, a relationship that you strongly reaffirmed in the 2017 National Security Strategy.”

The visit would be the first of its kind since the passage of the Taiwan Travel Act, a law Trump signed in March, to the chagrin of the Chinese. The recent use of lasers to injure a pair of American pilots, a senior Senate Republican suggested, was a “brush back pitch” thrown in retaliation over the law.

“They see us do things that could screw things up [for them] and we get some brush-back pitches now and again,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told the Washington Examiner during a recent interview. “[The Taiwan Travel Act], it bothered them a lot.”

China has cooperated with the U.S. to increase pressure on North Korea, but only up to a point; they’ve refused to apply the kind of pressure that would force Kim to decide between the collapse of his regime and denuclearization. Johnson suggested Chinese President Xi Jinping’s North Korea policy is part of an effort to roll back the U.S. military presence in the region.

“I suspect that maybe President Xi, behind the scenes with Kim Jong Un, is saying, 'Listen, you give this crap up, but what you have to get for it is, you got to get the U.S. to pull out; that’s your price for complete denuclearization,'” Johnson said.

But China is also deploying anti-ship missiles to artificial islands in the South China Sea, the kind of military build-up — in one of the most vital shipping lanes in the world — that makes some officials see a greater need than ever for the U.S. to remain strong in the region.

“If they've created a missile base that we can destroy, because we can position enough assets in the region that can penetrate defenses and destroy it, then we have neutralized that advantage,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., told the Washington Examiner.

Trump made clear on Friday he doesn’t want to take actions, even sanctions on North Korea, that could upset the potential for a “friendly negotiation” with Kim. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis hasn’t hesitated to send military forces through the South China Sea, notwithstanding Chinese objections. “Despite China's claims to the contrary, the placement of these weapons systems is tied directly to military use for the purposes of intimidation and coercion,” Mattis said.

But China might react more belligerently to a U.S. delegation to Taiwan. “We have repeatedly emphasized that the Taiwan issue is the most important and sensitive one sitting at the core of the China-U.S. relationship,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Tuesday. “The U.S. should strictly adhere to the one-China principle and the three joint Communiques and prudently handle the Taiwan issue so as to avoid harming bilateral ties and cross-Straits peace and stability.”

The real shame of the opioid crisis: An addiction industry that keeps preying on victims

I didn’t know much about the opioid crisis until July 2, 2017, when I got a call telling me to come home because my youngest sister Jenny was in the hospital and had just been revived with Narcan. I had to look up Narcan on the Internet to learn it was a drug used to reverse opioid overdoses.

I brought a blank check home with me and called a treatment center in upstate New York from the airport, assuming we were at the beginning of a long, difficult, and expensive recovery.

Since then I’ve read everything I can about the opioid crisis: surgeon general reports, commission recommendations, all the state opioid plans, research, and legislation. I’ve reached out to health experts and doctors. I’ve met with Senate staff. I’ve given a TEDx talk, written op-eds, and volunteered at an outpatient addiction treatment center in Baltimore.

The main thing I’ve learned: Despite a decline in the rates of opioid prescription, the current crisis has spawned a profitable, growing, and predatory market with no end in sight.

And it’s not just the Sackler family’s Purdue Pharma, which has made $35 billion in revenues on OxyContin since 1995. The burgeoning industry of addiction treatment is also haphazardly regulated, poorly understood, and rapidly expanding.

Finding evidence-based treatment for substance use disorder is difficult. I've tried. But those services were set up to be completely separate from mainstream healthcare and mental health services. There are no national standards of care. Online and television marketers prey on a vulnerable population and the revenue from their insurers, making promises without any data that accurately reflects results.

While many treatment programs, like Baltimore’s Concerted Care Group, offer excellent and evidence-based care, others engage in practices such as patient-brokering, in which large sums are paid for referrals. Some charge insurers exorbitant fees — for example, $4,000 per urine tests taken two to three times per week until the patient dies.

A 28-day treatment program costs an average of $30,500. Our family could have pooled our resources just one time to afford that option. But given the relapse rate of more than 90 percent for opioid addiction, this solution is not financially viable for most Americans. Moreover, the best chance for recovery is not with a rehab program at all, but with a doctor who is board-certified in “addiction medicine.”

This has only recently become an official specialty, so there are not enough providers to meet increasing demand. Medical schools in the United States devote an average of just 12 hours to substance abuse, and many doctors struggle to get licensed and reimbursed for providing care.

Narcan sales have increased from $21.3 million in 2011 to $274 million in 2016. In 2014, a two-dose package of Evzio, an auto-injector device designed for easy use by laypersons, cost $690. As of 2016, it cost $4,500, more than a 500 percent increase. It's the free market at its worst.

Given this ecosystem, it’s not surprising that 90 percent of the 21 million Americans with substance use disorder never get treatment. My sister was part of that majority. Jenny was a 44-year-old, college-educated, suburban mom who never went to a rehab program or had an intervention. Maybe she was ashamed, or maybe she was just overwhelmed with attempting to navigate this madness.

https:// www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/the-real-shame-of-the-opioid-crisis-an-addiction-industry-that-keeps-preying-on-victims

The UN is deceiving you to make you care about inequality

The United Nations has, once again, insisted that American levels of poverty are vast and demeaning to such a rich nation. The U.N. is, once again, misunderstanding the various statistics it is manipulating. The underlying truth is that the U.S. is more unequal than most other rich nations, and that’s really all that is being said.

This is actually a report by a Special Rapporteur, in this case Philip Alston. I discussed the errors in his draft report with you here. The final report is here. I’ve also been in direct contact with Alston and his reaction to those earlier criticisms was, in effect, gosh, yes, this is all difficult, isn’t it? That doesn’t excuse either the general reporting upon this nor the error at the heart of the report itself.

HuffPost tells us that the poor are becoming more destitute under Trump. That’s not really a possible finding in a report using data that only goes up to 2016. Reuters talks about extreme poverty, not something even measured in the various statistics presented. And then they tell us that there are 41 million in poverty, something that as I mentioned earlier just isn’t true. That’s the number who would be in poverty before the things we do to raise people up out of poverty (welfare programs).

In one sense, the report is better than the draft that we saw those months back. Alston does seem to have taken the basic criticism: U.S. poverty statistics, uniquely among the rich nations, measure those who need help, not those who have received it and are still poor. We do not include the effects of Medicaid, SNAP, EITC, Section 8 housing, and so on in reducing poverty when we talk of those in poverty. That’s comes out to about a trillion dollars that we just ignore. As I say, Alston does at least nod to the fact that this spending does reduce poverty. Thus the numbers indicated by the official poverty measure aren’t entirely accurate for our purposes, measuring the lived incidence of poverty, rather than what there would be without what we already do.

Sadly, he then goes on to make a different mistake, which is to point to the supplemental poverty measure and claim that this proves there is still that massive poverty. The supplemental measure is indeed better than the "official" measure in one respect, in that it includes the effects of much of what government does to reduce poverty, that trillion bucks or so. However, it’s also based on an entirely different definition of poverty. It doesn’t provide some objective level of living standard that is poverty, as the official measure does, but relies upon an entirely relative number.

It’s related to median income, to a percentage of that median income. That is, it’s a measure of inequality, not a measure of poverty. Now, sure, you can worry about inequality if that’s what you wish to do. I can’t get worked up over the idea that others have more than I do as long as I have sufficient income and material for myself. Most Americans also don’t seem to worry very much about inequality, the general judgement being that as long as everyone has enough, how much more others have is of little interest.

Is America an unequal country? It most certainly is, as every country is. The U.S. is rather more unequal than most rich countries, and quite a bit less unequal than poorer places like China and Brazil. But inequality is not poverty, whatever the current fashion is for describing it so. And that’s really all this U.N. report does manage to show, that the U.S. contains inequality. So what?

For if Alston, or the U.N., or the others who complain about it, really thought we all cared very much about inequality then they’d say they were talking about inequality, not poverty, wouldn’t they? The very fact that they obfuscate and use odd definitions shows that they know we don’t agree. Sure we’ll help the poor, indeed we do so, to the tune of that trillion dollars. That some have more than others isn’t something that worries us very much.

https:// www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-un-is-deceiving-you-to-make-you-care-about-inequality

>>1682754

I agree with you.

>>1682366

We knew it was coming they have been hinting at it for a while now.

>>1682435

You think this is the only thing he's worried about, he's got many, but I digress, this would be a lot of explaining wouldn't it. kek